Boxborough, Massachusetts-based Xyplex Inc, in process of being acquired by Raytheon Co, has announced the first three stages of its local area network switching product strategy. Phase One is the SwitchPlane Ethernet switching architecture, said to expand the Network 9000 Routing Hub midplane’s capabilities to provide switching functionality supporting over 8Gbps of throughput. According to the company, SwitchPlane supports, in addition to the existing Token Ring and Ethernet segments, seven switching slots interconnected through non-blocking full duplex 400Mbps channels. Xyplex says the SwitchPlane supports frame and cell operation, and has full upgradability to faster inter-slot transfer speeds. Phase two comprises local network switching modules and router modules. According to Xyplex, the former are ASIC-based local network switches that support 10Base-T, 10Base-FL, Fibre Distributed Data Interface and Fast Ethernet, and local network technologies that support up to 112 switched ports. Each module is said to provide over 8,000 MAC addresses. For backbone connection applications, the Xyplex router modules are said to support all existing Network 9000 router input-output board designs, including Asynchronous Transfer Mode, Fibre Distributed Data Interface and wide area network interfaces such as ISDN Primary and Binary Rate Interface. The Series 500 family will support all major protocols including Internet Protocol, Internet Packet Exchange, DECnet Phase IV, AppleTalk and Open Systems Interconnection, as well as Spanning Tree and translational bridging, the firm says. The Series 500 and 600 will be managed by ControlPoint, its SNMP management system, says Xyplex. This is said to support systems including SunNet Manager for Unix and HP OpenView for Unix and Windows. Phase three will address virtual networking. Xyplex says that, due to its tight integration of switching and routing technologies, it will enable users to form virtual workgroups by supporting level two switching within virtual local area networks and level three routing between them. Initially, Network 9000 virtual local network capabilities will improve performance by constraining multicasts and dictating inter-local network traffic through bridge-routers, says Xyplex. Phase one is available now. Phase two will ship in the first half of 1995, with Phase three following in the second half. There are no firm prices as yet, but according to Xyplex, its switched Ethernet will cost less than $500 per 10Base-T port.
